In 2019 I bought a small website called 1kprojects. To take payments, we set up our own Paddle account.
It did not last long. And so we started upon a journey where we were kicked off every payment processor known to man. For a stretch of history they really hated marketplaces that dealt in digital work, and that's exactly what we were.
I'm a citizen of one country with businesses in others. Most of the time that's a line on a form. In payments it's a red flag or a problem. Providers like your passport, your company and your bank account to agree on where you live. Mine rarely do.
That's also where small internet businesses get hurt, wherever they're based. The webhook that arrives twice and bills the same customer again. The renewal that fails quietly for months. The dispute that lands after you've already refunded. The payout held for six months that nobody mentions until you need the cash. The product can be lovely and the business still bleeds out through the plumbing.
The provider documentation is very good at the first test payment. After that it goes silent.
So we wrote the book we kept wishing someone else had written. Well – my partner Sean wrote most of the very very useful bits. I contributed. It's called Payments Playbook. It covers what breaks once real customers start paying, and the Python to fix it. It's a thousand pages long. Yes, I know how that sounds.
For the record, I am not a programmer. My name is now on a book with ninety-odd code examples in it. I'll let you sit with that.
It's also the first book we've shipped the way I think books should work now. You buy it once, and it keeps being updated, because the payment providers change their minds more often than any printed edition could keep up with.
It isn't written for most people who read this site. It's for the engineers who own the payments code, and the founders who'd quite like to sleep.
Least romantic thing I've ever helped make. But useful!
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